I worked in a school system (Laredo TX) in the late 80’s where there was merit pay available. It was no great sum, but who got it was at the discretion of the building principal. Year after year, the same tiny handful of teachers got the merit pay. I suppose it could have been that they were consistently the best teachers; but, I can’t help but think that they were her friends from outside of work had something to do with it.
As a teacher, I would love merit pay. As a rational(?) person, however, I see just too many ways to abuse the system to make it practical. By the time you add all the procedures and oversight necessary to ensure fairness, you’ve sucked up all of the budget for extra pay.
May I just say that I don’t think you realize how companies work either. A program is not the brain child of a single person. The success/failure a program may have exactly nothing to do with the relative skills/efforts of the programmers involved. He could have coded the requirements with outstanding skill and ingenuity, but if the requirements sucked the program will suck. If the program wasn’t marketed correctly it might not make a dime, yet you want to stick the programmer with no bonus because of marketing’s mistake. There’s no objective measurement for programmers either. Can’t pay someone based on how many lines of code they write, a good programmer uses fewer lines than a bad programmer. I guess it’s impossible to objectively rate a programmer, so they shouldn’t get merit pay.
Determining merit is inherently difficult and involves personal judgement. Unless you’re in a factory and get rated by the number of pieces per hour you process, or a salesman on commission, it’s nearly impossible to get a truly objective measure of productivity.
It’s easy to throw up all sorts of road blocks to why you can’t “accurately” measure someone. Of course, that doesn’t stop every single teacher in the nation from assessing their students on a daily basis. Who’s to say that one essay is better written than another, or one persons analysis of a historical event is better than someone elses? The teacher makes that judgement call and rates the student, but can’t bear to have the same judgement made for them.
I get assessed every year by my manager and rated. I have a set of commitments that I agree to, and depending on how HE thinks I did in comparison to those commitments determines where I’m rated. This is for one of the biggest corporations in the world, and pretty much everyone working here gets rated the same way.
There’s no reason to think it can’t work for teachers. Well, except for the inevitable screeching about how one person got more merit pay than the other. This would never happen, of course, because teachers aren’t in it to get rich.
Do any state employees get merit pay? I know my mom is an awesome tax collector, but she certainly isn’t getting an bonus checks any time soon. Government jobs are different.
Don’t let Sam fool you that industry has the magic answer to performance reviews. I’m not an HR person, but I spent years on performance review improvement committees and done focus groups and stuff. Hardly anyone does this well. I spoke to a Harvard Business School prof who specialized in this, and his opinion was that no company is ever satisfied with their performance review policy.
Just one more problem with doing this for teachers - our friend teaches in a suburb of Phoenix (second grade) and she has 200 - 300% turnover in her class every year. How exactly are you going to measure her? Most bosses have fewer employees than principals do teachers, and are closer to them while they work (and one of the biggest complaints we got was bosses not really knowing what people did and rating on invalid assumptions. I’ve seen it happen.) If a principal has 24 teachers, and sits in on a class one hour per month, that is one hour per day devoted to this. Will it happen? Not likely - and is one hour a month really enough input?
I would like to see better ways of disciplining really bad teachers, but Ahnolds proposal is yet another simplistic solution trying to play to the audience.
I’m not a teacher, and neither is my wife, so I have no horse in this race - especially since my youngest kid is a high school senior.
First, you took what I said out of context. There is a reason that last sentence was in a different paragraph. It referred to something else.
Second, of course one programmer doesn’t usually make a whole program. I don’t think most thought that that was the point I was making. My point, is that they are making something. They produce work that is used by other people within a company. That work can be evaluated. Of course the evaluation is subjective, but it is based on some criteria. How could you do the same for teachers?
Your analogy about teachers and students is flawed. Students produce work that is evaluated by teachers. They are like employees at a company. Teachers don’t produce anything which could be used by principals to directly measure their performance.
Your last comment is erroneous. Just because teachers don’t teach to get rich doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be jealous of an inferior colleague that makes more than them. The two are not mutually exclusive. I didn’t say they are robots that don’t care about money, just that they aren’t going to going to be motivated in the same way some others are by a small bonus. Besides, do you really think someone who becomes a teacher wants to be rich? Do you think they are stupid? How exactly would a teacher think becoming rich was possible with the salaries they make?
First of all, in most (maybe all) big companies the manager above your boss makes the ultimate decision. Some managers say all their people are great, some say they all suck. Some are reasonable. You really need to have been in some of these sessions (lor even run one) before you say you know how they work. I’ve been to great ones, and I’ve been to ones where I wanted to puke afterwards, and for one very big company I started looking for a new job moments (literally!) after I went through it. And my people did well.
actually, brickbacon, i don’t know if it is the same everywhere but i get evaluated every year as a teacher. by my principal. he observes my class in a designated week (altho he has been known to pop in randomly to any class he feels like) and there are evaluation forms that we fill out on ourselves and he fills out on us.
in theory, i think merit pay would be great. with the way the system is working though, it scares me. i teach special ed. my kids are already way behind and by the time they get to me (junior high) they have likely dealt with A LOT of failure in the classroom. with the expectation that most of them will take a grade level test, they are already set up for failure. my colleagues and myself are expected to do the impossible in many cases.
if there was a complex system of peer evaluations, administrative evaluations, parent evaluations and in some cases student evaluations i would feel more comfortable with the idea, but i can’t imagine it happening.
yes, of course any good teacher (myself included) is not in it for the money. but when there isn’t enough money in the field to pay bills, support kids (i’m a single parent), and heck, buy all the supplies that our meager school budgets don’t cover, then the chances of losing good teachers because they can’t afford to stay in the job is very real.
I think teachers produce a pretty sizeable portfolio of work over the course of a year. All of the homework that is assigned and graded is a reflection of the teacher’s skills. Is the homework appropriate, is it graded promptly, did the teacher put effort into grading? Are the tests fair, and graded fairly? Are projects thought provoking? Do the students show growth in their knowledge during the year? Are they producing good quality work at the end of the year? This all reflects on the ability of the teacher to run a classroom.
A teacher is somewhat like a manager of a 30 child department. His effectiveness is reflected in the work produced by his department. My manager, and his manager, don’t necessarily produce much individual work of their own, most of that is done by the staff. They are still reviewed and rated and judged by the people they report to.
Should teacher reviews be objective? Probably not. The idea that a special ed teacher should be evaluated by seeing how his kids do on standard tests is ridiculous. That teacher needs to be evaluated based on how you would expect his class to perform, not based on how they do against the average.
A lot of the comments suggest that people would not trust the administrators of a school to fairly rate teachers. What does that say about the people running our schools? I feel very confident that my manager gives his reports a fair shake when doing his annual review. One of the things about my annual review that I like is that it also includes a critique of my work. Constructive criticism and ideas of things I can do in the upcoming year to improve my work. Do they not have anything like this in teaching?
My last comment was a bit mean spirited, I know teachers aren’t in it for the money. However, do not discount the ability of money to affect people’s behaviors.
I am completely with Sam Stone on this. There is nothing inherently different about the teaching profession, that the private sector merit model can’t be applied to.
There would be multiple criteria, as Sam listed. The criteria would be defined and agreed upon by all parties at the beginning of the year. It would require that department heads and principals evaluate the teacher’s performance on those criteria.
The evaluation process does not require that the employee’s output only be something that can be measured objectively. There’s nothing that I do that can be measured that way, yet I’ve managed to get a reasonably fair review every year for 25 years. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.
It would be no more a budgeting nightmare in schools than it is in the private sector. The legislature determines the “merit increase pool” (as we call it in my company) when they do the budget. That pool gets divided up based on merit. So a rating of a “5” may get you a 6% raise one year, a 2% raise the next. That’s life.
But don’t most managers of 30 person departments have the authority to pick and choose who their employees are? Sure, a new manager has to work with the employees that are already there, but one of the ways to improve performance in the department is to fire the slackers and incompetents. Teachers can’t do that.
Furthermore, the kind of evaluation that would be required for a merit pay system to function properly takes an enormous amount of time, and thus tremendous expense. How often do politicians/taxpayers vote for more money for schools? I’m thinking this kind of system will require a lot more middle managers. The principal and two vice-principals at the high school at which my wife teaches deal with well over 100 employees and a couple thousand kids. I’ve never had a direct boss who supervises more than 15 people total. And department heads don’t count–they’re also full time teachers and get little or no additional pay for the honor.
Rick
I just want to say that this is absolutly not true. I teach “regular” English and I teach AP English and I’ve foung that getting brilliant students to stretch themselves further than they have ever thought they could possibly go is at least as hard, if not harder, than teaching kids of more average abilities. Yes, it’s harder to actually screw up a smart kid and ruin his whole future, but unlocking their full potential without burning them out takes a delicate hand, not to mention more hours than there are in a day, and it isn’t a job just anybody can do.
Caring about what they do for a living?
I agree that this is the trouble. Look at the tenure debate - people think that it’s very flawed, but teachers are generally behind it because it protects some of their rights from administrators. If administrators are involved in determining how much they are paid, you might have the same problem.
First, I’m not saying there’s a ‘magical formula’ for this. It’s hard work, and it’s a regular subject for discussion in our company among others. But it IS done, in the vast majority of cases. Most people work in companies where they get raises and perks based on merit. There’s nothing unique to teachers or other unionized employees that prevents them from being judged on their merits. In my wife’s job there is no merit pay, but everyone knows who the good and bad nurses are. It’s not a mystery. I have a friend who’s a teacher, and it’s obvious to him as well.
What would be wrong with sending teacher evaluations home with parents, having peer evaluations between teachers, Principal reports on teachers, evaluations of student test scores, student comments, sick/attendance history, records of significant after-school volunteerism, etc, all piled into a big evaluation meeting for the teacher? Let the Principal do it, have the principal give an evaluation, then let the teacher comment on it. The evaluation, along with the teacher’s comments about the evaluation, are passed up to the school district so that the principal can be evaluated as well. Principals who have continual anomalies in their evaluations or a much hgher than average level of teacher complaints about their own evaluations could be reviewed, etc. That’s the way most big companies work. Is it perfect? No. But is the alternative, in which everyone throws up their hands and says, “Oh well, teachers can’t be evaluated. So let the good move along with the bad.”?
Rick, there are certainly differences between the school world and the business world. The fact that there are differences only means you must account for those differences. It does not automatically make reviews impossible. I mean, the people doing the reviews would be experienced educators, they should understand the classroom and what it means to excel.
Your point on cost is 100% valid. If there is no way to get reasonable reviews without hiring more managers, then implementing merit pay is a lot more difficult to justify. This is the sort of thing that needs ot be decided on a district by district basis, though. I don’t think anyone can make a sweeping statement either way about how much it would cost.
I’m retired now from teaching and I don’t know what Tennessee school systems are doing now.
During the last years that I was teaching, we had an optional career ladder program based on merit pay which involved outside observation combined with personal interviews combined with feedback from students, colleagues, and administrators. Even then, there were some unbelievable problems and a statewide uproar about the evaluations.
I opted to take a test and did just fine and automatically added another thousand dollars to my salary. (This was about 16 or 17 years ago.)
But I also chose an evaluation because I thought that after so many years that it would be good for me to be scrutinized after years of “drive-by” evaluations where everything was always marked as if I were perfect. And I needed the extra income.
My classroom was in an inner city high school and the evaluator sat in, at my invitation, on a fundamental sophomore English class. At a conference with the evaluator after school, she had graded me down on handling discipine problems. I couldn’t remember anything that had not been handled smoothly and so I asked her why I had been marked down. She said she had not observed any discipline problems and therefore she could not give me a good rating for handling them well!
That is the sort of stupidity that teachers run into during evaluations.
There are also many things beyond the teacher’s control. In our school system, the principals were paid according to how many students were on the rolls. Students who signed up the first day were not dropped from the rolls even though school officials knew perfectly well that they had transferred. That meant I had to keep them on my rolls too. How could I be responsible for them?
How could I be responsible for a student who missed my class every day and was reported to the office for missing that class – but who was actually skipping class to hang out in the office?
What could I do when a ninth grader who still could not spell his name had his grade changed by a principal who said, “Well, he didn’t do well in the ninth grade; let’s see how he does in the tenth.”
I agree that public schools should be out of the hands of the government. Standards should be raised for teachers, administrators and students. Approaches to education should be completely revamped.
BTW, there is no way to compare teaching lower grades with teaching high school. They are different jobs with differing requirements. Both are difficult and demanding.
As someone already mentioned, teachers don’t typically choose their students. This is an important difference. Another important point is that the perception that every kid is a malleable lump of clay that can be molded by a good teacher is often false. Most people get similar grades throughout school. Despite the fact that they will have all types of teachers (good and bad), most don’t advance relative to their peers. I will find the magazine that has the study when I get the chance. If a teacher gets a crappy lot of kids, there isn’t too much he/she can do to make them honors students. It’s like building a house on a shaky foundation.
I don’t necessarily think merit pay would be a terrible idea, it’s just that I don’t think it could be done in an productive, meaningful way.
I’m a high school teacher in the state governed by Ahhnold, and merit pay has become a popular discussion amongst my colleagues over beers on Friday afternoons. Our consensus: Arnie can kiss our asses.
It’s unworkable because:
-
There’s just too many factors that go into educating a child that are beyond the control of the teacher. 99% of my students that are struggling academically (and that aren’t diagnosed with a real learning disability) are that way because they have clueless parents. Too many of these “parents” are trying to be their kid’s best friend and are unwilling to be a motivator and convince the student do what is required to make themselves a complete person.
-
Standardized tests are being mentioned as a major component of determining merit. Big problem. These tests do not measure student achievement or teaching ability, they measure test-taking skills. Additionally, the students have absolutely no incentive to do well on these tests- the scores have no impact upon whether they graduate, their college admissions, or scholarship eligibility. Many students recognize the waste of time these tests are and just bubble-in random designs on the Scantron.
-
Cliques. There are those teachers that are in good with the administrators that would be doing any subjective evaluations, and there are those teachers that have personality conflicts with them. The quality of the teacher in the classroom has little bearing upon which of those two categories the teacher will find themselves. One of my colleagues is a wonderful, award-winning teacher that was unfairly despised by our former principal; I’m certain that he would be SOL when the merit pay checks came out.
-
A school works best when it’s a community of faculty working together as a team; introducing such an unbalanced pay system could lead to jealousy that would undermine the team effort.
-
Much of what makes a good teacher are intangibles. There’s more to life than just getting straight As. If I have a student that starts the year as a real asshat and I manage to get through to him and convice him to modify his behavior into something more civil, I still consider that a success story even if he finishes my course with a D-minus and poor CAT-6 scores. How does one measure that in terms of teacher performance?
-
Things might be fair if it was set up such that if the entire school reached a set goal, then everyone in the school was rewarded. Oh wait, that’s what they tried a few years ago! Guess what? The state ran out of money and that system was halted. So, where’s the money for this merit pay system going to come from?
I teach at one of those affluent suburban schools where most of the kids are white and all speak English. The vast majority of my students graduate and many go onto top-name colleges. Students oftentimes say I’m their favorite teacher because they learn so much from me. I’m in good with all the administrators, all the way up to the superintendant. The principal gives me “exceeds professional expectations” marks on my evaluations. I teach science, one of those subjects where teachers are in great demand. I spend a good deal of my own time advising students in extracurricular activities and I’m usually one of the last to leave the parking lot after school. Based on these measures I should profit handsomely from a merit pay system. But, for the most part, I’m just lucky to have ended up in such a plum situation. I know I don’t work any harder than my friends working in the inner-city whose students have poorer academic marks. I’m against a merit-pay system because I just can’t see how it would work fairly for all teachers working in such a wide variety of circumstances. And above all else, any government-run entity must operate as fairly as possible for everyone.
So don’t base it on blanket test scores. Really, these are straw men. You’re throwing out suggestions for how teachers would be evaluated, then showing they won’t work, then using that to dismiss the entire idea of evaluation. If those methods won’t work, others might. Staff reviews. Student improvement, to normalize the quality of the students. Organization. Service above and beyond the call. Principal evaluations.
Do you want to know the real reason why so many unions fight merit pay? It’s because of the bell curve. Half the union workers are going to be below average. Of the ones that are above average, typically only 20% or so will really stand out. But unions have to focus on where the bulk of the membership is, and that’s why they consistently oppose merit pay. That doesn’t mean it’s right, especially when the good of the many conflicts with the job itself, and most especially when the job is teaching our children.
Actually, I think that most posters are focussing on how evaluations would be set up, based on the way that the evaluations of schools (and teachers) were set up in Bush’s Needy Children Left Behind program. Basically, the government sets a “standard” of improvement that the school must meet, then regardless of the social conditions that interfere with the ability to meet those standards, the schools are rewarded or punished according to how well they do on the artifical standard. So schools in really terrible neighborhoods are routinely punished for not improving, regardless of how many kids come to school without breakfast from neighborhoods where the drug dealers are king and the parents have no experience of education on which to base a desire of their own to promote their childrens’ education.
Now, if the NCLB program had addressed those issues when issuing punitive scorecards, I think we could talk about merit pay for teachers, but rather than strawmen, those who object to the likelihood of merit pay are reacting to real life conditions. With the reality of NCLB to look at, it is the claim that a good system “could” be set up in some imaginary world where reality is part of administrative decisions that is outside reality.
Is there a way to establish merit pay for teachers? Possibly. But it would require changing much more than just NEA attitudes and it is currently just pie-in-the-sky dreaming.
(Even the goal of merit pay is simply a feel good solution to a vexing problem. Merit pay does not really work in industry, either, (which is why so many companies make discussion of pay a firing offense). Basically, employees get “reviews” and either live with the results or get mad and quit, but those reviews are generally no more accurate than group promotion. This is not to say that no company has ever managed to pull it off, but I have now seen enough companies to know that the standards and the reviewers vary so widely that the best that can be said is that most people go home with a feeling that management tried to personalize their pay, but it rarely results in actual performance enhancement.)